I Vitelloni

Federico Fellini, Italy, 1953, bw (8.4*)
Enjoyable early Fellini comedy film about a group of slackers, ne’er do wells who are content to merely chase women, drink, and dream rather than apply themselves to constructive endeavors.

One of a small group of friends, Fausto Moretti, seduces Sandra, a sister of his friend and companion Moraldo Rubini, then against his intuition, he does the right thing and marries her. After their honeymoon, he takes a boring job as a salesman of religious objects in a small shop that barely has any customers. He still looks at (and goes for) other women, along with his friends. He even mistakes some messages from his bosses wife and tries to seduce her, and is fired.

Still, not much changes in the lives of any of the group. This film is not about going anywhere in particular, but just as much about not making much effort to get anywhere either, and have some pleasures along the road to nowhere if possible. Fellini is merely giving us a snapshot here of a lazy lifestyle, or rather a beautifully photographed cinematic portrait, in the era of the growing beatnik movement, when work was considered the opposite of freedom.

Vitellone is literal for fatted veal calf, but on the dvd, Fellini defines it as aimless, do-nothing guys, or slackers. It is said that this film is autobiographical, at least partially so. It is also given credit for defining the modern term, or usage of slackers as well.

Read more...

Nights of Cabiria

Federico Fellini, Italy, 1957, bw (8.5*)
Cabiria is a wide-eyed, waifish street walker from a poor section of Rome, wonderfully played by Guilietta Masina. We can pretty much surmise her life from the few scenes shown to us by Fellini.

She only seeks true love, but is instead nearly drowned by her boyfriend, who also steals money from her. A movie star takes her home. An accountant says he saw her on the stage once, fate brought them together again. and so on.. In spite of all this, she still inhabits a sad and lonely world - after all, this is Italian realism. No "pretty woman", this is more like real life - the hookers in Hollywood (Klute, Pretty Woman, L.A. Confidential, with Oscars for those 3 actresses by the way) all seem to be only the high-class escort variety, not real streetwalkers.

This is a simple film, carried totally by the performance of Masina, who snares the audience early and then you're caught. To me, this is the best performance in all of Fellini's films. She seems resigned to her life, yet is also childishly hopeful. She still possesses a vitality that life should have drained by now. The fact that Fellini is her husband makes this perhaps the finest collaboration of spouses in Italian cinema. Thankfully, Fellini didn't fill this story with surrealism, it's more like La Strada than 8 ½.

Oscar winner for foreign language film, and a total of 15 awards, 4 for Giulietta Masina for best actress. No. 223 on the IMDB 250, No. 136 on our compendium of all net polls.

Read more...

Bicycle Thieves

Ladri di biciclette
Vittorio De Sica, Italy, (1949) bw (9.2*)
Best Foreign Film (AA, GG)
Best Film (BAA)
In this hallmark film of Italian post-war realism, former actor Vittorio De Sica used all amateur actors and a street realism style with stunning results. De Sica presents probably the most uncompromising and least hopeful of film stories, the film is so depressing that I've had a hard time recommending it here.

The story is a simple one, a poor Italian man, played by factory worker Lamberto Maggiorani, with a young boy gets a job posting film signs only because he has a bicycle. But like most material objects in harsh economic conditions, it gets stolen. Now the man has no bicycle to get to his job, therefore it threatens his job as well. This bicycle becomes the holy grail of this man's life and of this film.

De Sica and the other post-war realists didn't believe in the make-believe world presented by films prior to the war. Rather than escape from reality, they sought to bring the harsh reality of everyday life to the filmgoing public, perhaps with the hope that by raising awareness of the plight of some, people will be angered enough to work to make those conditions more dignified.

It's hard not to be moved by this film. Considered by many one of the finest films ever made, it certainly should be near the top of most polls. No. 85 on the IMDB 250, No. 16 on our compendium of all film polls so it's apparent that critics rank this film a much higher than the general public.

Winner of 16 awards (out of 17 nominations), including an Oscar® and Golden Globe for best foreign language film, and a British academy award (BAFTA) for best overall film.

Note: growing up, this film was always "The Bicycle Thief" - I'm not sure when or why it became plural, but I'm using the title used at IMDB

Read more...

The Night Porter

Liliani Cavani, Italy, 1974 (8.3*)
Il portiere di notte
[in English]
Memorial Day War-a-thon #5

This film deals with the dark side of human sexuality, one which grew out of a twisted relationship during World War II, so it's also a metaphor for the dark side of society itself. People may appear normal on the outside, but..

Charlotte Rampling plays Lucia, a concentration camp survivor who, twelve years later and now married to a famous orchestra conductor, meets her former captor Maximilian by chance, when they check into a Viennese hotel he is the night porter there. Dirk Bogarde turns in one of his most riveting performances as the night clerk, a man nonchalant and passionless on the outside, but who releases a torrent of sadomasochistic eroticicm when alone with Charlotte, as she is all too willing to continue what was started in the camp, when she was the teenage victim of s/m sex experiments with Bogarde. Apparently her present life, even though affluent and safe, isn't as passionate nor as fulfilling as her prior one.

This is the most interesting aspect of the story, the long term psychological ramifications of those surviving traumatic experiences, and those who become bonded to their captors. In one regard, since this relationship became necessary for Maximilian as well, it kept Lucia alive through the war, so he saved her life, even if as his sex slave. Bogarde still meets with other former camp officers in the present day, to discuss surviving in the present society and remaining anonymous, so their shared memories remain alive through the group.

Caviani did a good job of making all this complexity understandable, if not sympathetic. The films weakness is not making us care what happens to these characters; they seem self-absorbed and uninterested in normal society, likely as a result of surviving the camp. The films strong point is that it shows how dysfunctional society itself can be in creating people like this, how it's possible for personal demons to prevent people from change, and how their unchecked obsessions can consume the soul.

Some dismissed this as sensationalism, I found it a chilling expose of the dark side of the Nazi psyche, the need to control people totally, only deriving pleasure from inflicting pain.This film made Rampling an international star, but it wasn't until the recent Under the Sand that she lived up to her dramatic potential. In this film, a woman's longtime husband swims in the ocean while she naps on the beach, and after awakening finds that her husband has disappeared.

Read more...

The Legend of 1900

Guiseppe Tornatore, Italy, 1998 (8.2*)
Happy Birthday, Guiseppe, May 27th, 1957!
The movie is definitely unique, about a man who spends his entire life on board an ocean liner and becomes a fantastic piano player for the ship's orchestra. The award-winning cinematography of Lajos Koltai coupled with the direction of Tornatore, director of the Oscar®-winning Cinema Paradiso, Malena, and Star Maker, makes this film happen for many, it's simply gorgeous to see.

The story begins with a man pawning a trumpet, the hearing of an obscure fragment of music on a recording, and the window to the memory of wonderful times is opened once again. We are invited into this memory through a magical tale.

Tim Roth has one of his most demanding and interesting roles in this - he plays the man whose lifetime home is the floating cruise ship, he never leaves it, fearing the outside world. Thus the ship becomes a supplicant mother, whom he never knew, he was found on the ship in a basket. Since a child, he has become an expert pianist on the ship through constant practice, and at one point Clarence Williams comes on board as the arrogant Jelly Roll Morton, who challenges Roth to a piano duel, certainly one of the film's highlights. Pruitt Taylor Vince has his best career role as Roth's best friend, a trumpet player on the ship.

The film is complex and can be said to be about many things, both physical and metaphysical. This ambitious semi-epic covers four decades in a man and a ship's life - it paints a picture of a world only this one man could know. It certainly has the air of a fable, a light fantasy, in which it's possible to live your lifetime within a cruiseliner, sheltered from the outside world like an unborn baby.

This got 7.9 at IMDB, but only 58 from Metacritics, so the public likes it more than the critics.

Winner of 15 awards out of 20 nominations

Read more...

The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964, Italy (9.0*)
Pasolini's intention was to film the gospel verbatim, without Hollywood scripting, without blue-eyed, blond Jesus actors - his actor was a Spanish student, Enrique Irazoqui, who'd never made a film - this works much better than using an established actor. Compare this to the U.S. films that used Max Von Sydow and Jeffrey Hunter (both blond and blue-eyed!)

The story is totally unembellished, so it appears fragmented and fast-paced. The extras are all Mediterraneans, so they look authenic for once. The settings are very sparse, primitive, and poor. Roger Ebert said "it looks like a documentarian with a low budget followed Jesus around", and gave it 5*'s, his top rating. It's like NO other religious film I've seen: grainy, gritty, realistic, almost manic and fanatical in places.

Make sure you view the subtitled, black and white original version. There's an awful dubbed version, and even a colorized version out there. The disk I rented had the original, and the colorized/dubbed one both - they managed to ruin it both ways in one version.

#103 on our "Top Ranked 1000" films compiled from internet polls

Pasolini was murdered in Italy in 1975 after making a dozen films, most say by the neo-fascist right wing. He had just completed "Salo", based on the Marquis de Sade.

Read more...

Seven Beauties

Lina Wertmüller, Italy, 1975 (9.0*)

This would have to be considered the masterpiece of famed Italian director Lina Wertmüller (a former ass't director to Fellini), who wrote and directed this wartime story of a small-time Italian named Pasqualino with 'seven beauties' as sisters (hence the title, also perhaps a slight reference to Fellini from his former assistant), wonderfully played by Giancarlo Giannini in a performance of a lifetime. We see his character before the war, his strutting pomposity and self-importance (he is only large in his own imagination), his attention to every detail of personal appearance. Then reality strikes along with WW2, he ends up in a POW camp for killing a man who pimped out one of his sisters.

Giannini is perfect, especially his body language and the range of facial expressions he uses. He makes us laugh during even the most squeamish of scenes, as when he's seducing the giant prison kapo wonderfully underplayed by Shirley Stoller [photo below]. Somehow he manages to be both comic and tragic at the same time, something Roberto Benigni failed to do but was rewarded anyway (with two Oscars®) for Life Is Beautiful, in a performance I saw as so flippant that it robbed the film of its intended poignancy. (I saw this as an homage to Chaplin, just not as well achieved by Benigni)

This film never loses its tragic edge, the humor merely underscores the bleak circumstances for all its characters. Irony and subtlety are used perfectly to describe the fragile and tragic human condition, as individuals must decide how far they must descend in order to survive. This fact alone probably means that European audiences will appreciate it more than American ones, as we've never been totally occupied by enemy armies.

Shirley Stoller as the POW camp commandant

This film was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Director (John Avildsen won for Rocky, one of the worst choices of all time, it should have been Sidney Lumet for Network), Best Foreign Language Film (the forgettable Black and White In Color won), Best Screenplay (directly for the screen, Paddy Chayefsky deservedly won for Network), all three for Wertmüller [photo below], who became the first woman nominated for a best director award; and also Best Actor for Giancarlo Giannini. She was also nominated by the Directors Guild of America, losing to Lumet for Network, and another foreign film nomination at the Golden Globes, losing to the inferior Bergman film Face to Face.


Note: none of the directors who lost to first-time director Avildsen that night (Bergman for Face to Face, Lumet for Network, Pakula for All the President's Men, and Wertmuller) ever won an Oscar®.


[As #701 in our recommended film count, we decided to stick with the 'seven' title theme. We've now done The Seven Year Itch, The Seventh Seal, Seven Samurai, and Seven Beauties.]

Read more...

The Best of Youth

Marco Tullio Giordana, Italy, 2003 (9.0*)
This epic Italian miniseries of four hours, now packaged as a solo feature film, follows two brothers from the time they leave home after high school and go their separate ways up until they are middle-aged. One brother takes a more free-wheeling, soul searching route that takes him to the near wilderness of Norway then back to Italy. The other brother opts for the more fascist tradition, first in the military, later in an urban police force. You might say one is left-wing politically, the other right, or at least they come to represent those two sides of Italian politics at the time the story begins in the 60's.

We see the different characters develop over time, their romances, their career changes, and also how their stories occasionally intersect. This is a well done, complete, and satisfying story that gives justice to the epic story of adult lifetimes.

Winner of 19 awards overall, including Un Certain Regard at Cannes, and numerous Italian film awards (the entire male cast won best actor, and the female cast best actress). It's also now showing up on many all-time top 1000 film lists. It's ranked #700 on our compendium of internet polls.

Read more...

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1970 (8.4*)
Best Foreign Film (AA)
The Finzi-Continis are a family of wealthy, aristocratic Jews living in Italy during the 1920's. They routinely open up their spacious gardens to the public so everyone can enjoy nature's beauty. Part of that beauty is Dominique Sanda, who is exquisite as Micol, who seems to enjoy toying with the emotions of her suitors between rounds of tennis and parties. The tranquility of the garden and serenity of the estate isolate the family from the growing current of fascism that will lead to the war and the holocaust.

De Sica, unlike his early films, fills Garden with lush, romantic images, in a kind of hazy, painterly color palette, almost as if seeing a film of a dream of an idyllic lifestyle that only exists briefly, if at all. Though it does not rank with De Sica's best (The Bicycle Thief, Umberto D.), it's still another classic Italian film, and well worth seeing for its own merits.

Winner of eight awards overall, including the Oscar® for foreign language film

Read more...

Il Posto

Ermanno Olmi, 1961, Italy, bw (8.4*)
This is one of the most amazing films I've ever seen. A kid goes into post-war Milan to get a job at a major company, and we follow him from home to the interview, which also involves some simple tests. While there he meets an attractive girl also on a job search. The two flirt through with minor chit-chat, but they don't know if they'll see each other again if either is not hired.

The only drama in the film comes from them getting hired or not. This is Italian neo-realism at its most realistic. Director Olmi not only makes this work, thanks to all amateur actors, but with a great director's touch actually keeps us riveted on the mundane as if life itself was about to break out. This is on many all-time top 1000 film polls.

Read more...

Federico Fellini's 8 ½

Federico Fellini, 1960, Italy, bw (8.3*)
Federico Fellini's 8 ½ is probably Fellini's most famous film, and is certainly his most artistic. It's a bit surreal for most audiences, but if you don't mind getting visually assaulted with all types of seemingly unrelated images, such as rockets on launching pads, nuns, beautiful women modeling high fashion, and don't get overwhelmed by all the symbolism, then this could be an enjoyable ride through the senses.

Otherwise, it may provide two hours of tedium as there is no real story progression, nor any gripping characters or plotlines. It's more about the style and inner mind of Fellini himself, and less about a vehicle of entertainment for the masses. The title supposedly refers to Fellini, who is the one-half, played by Marcello Mastrionni, as a director plagued by self-doubt, and eight women in his life, mostly ex-wives.

Personally, I prefer his study of decadence among the famous, La Dolce Vita, as it's Italian realism; this is Italian surrealism, closer to Salvadore Dali's artwork than, say, a Vittorio De Sica drama. Yet this ranks very high on all-time film polls. It's #37 on our survey of all internet film polls..

Read more...

La Dolce Vita

Federico Fellini, 1960, Italy, bw (8.4*)
Palm D'or Award, Cannes
This study of moral decadence and boredom among a group of wealthy film personalities is for many the best by legendary director Federico Fellini - it's certainly my favorite. Not as confusing as some others, like 8 ½, it is a simple, plotless story that puts us in the position of papparazzi with a motion picture camera giving us glimpses into unique personalities, primarily those in entertainment.

Led by Marcello Mastrianni and Swedish bombshell Anita Ekberg, we get to see the kind of life we imagine others live on a day-to-day basis. Depending on your moral mindset, this is either a depraved life of decadence or a glittering night life of fun and frivolity with the 'beautiful people'.

This film says a lot about the human condition, as most of us are trapped in a humdrum daily routine like Marcello, from which we imagine escaping to our own personal fantasies of happiness. Some may be bored by this, as it is lengthy at 170 minutes, but many find it a unique work of creative genius. Those who have trouble with Italian neo-realism should probably avoid this. For those who don't, also check out Antonioni's L'avventura, and De Sica's Umberto D.

Winner of 7 awards out of 14 nominations, including the Palm D'or at Cannes.
Awards page at IMDB

Read more...

El Alamein

Enzo Monteleone, 2002, Italy (8.1*)
A war film unlike any other you've likely seen as it covers the harrowing situation of Italian troops on the front line in North Africa. Little did we know in the west that the troops were basically given up for dead by the Italian command; men were forced to eat horses and drink their own urine when their water ran out. In spite of that, they bravely fought on as if they had a reason.

This film shows the nearly schizoid mindset of Mussolini, as instead of sending water to his troops, he sent a truckload of shoe polish so their boots would shine when they marched into Cairo, and his own personal horse so he could proudly ride in with the troops. Meanwhile the Italian positions were being overrun by Allied tanks, and the Italian soldiers were cut off from all supply lines.

This is a gritty and tough war film, one you won't easily forget. It is also a human story that follows one platoon, soldiers that were fighting on bravely in spite of the insanity of their government and military leaders. This should be on everyone's list of must-see dramatic war films, and on the large list of great Italian films, who seem to excel in realism.

Read more...

Kapó

Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy, 1959, bw (8.4*)
A long overlooked holocaust story is now available on dvd. Director Pontecorvo is best known for the ultra-realistic war docudrama The Battle of Algiers, which is a must see for fans of both war films and Italian cinema. Before making that classic, he gave us a smaller war film, yet a universal story no doubt enacted over and over in World War II.

Susan Strasbourg gives a strong and realistic portrayal of a 14-year old Jewish girl thrown into a concentration camp with her parents. She quickly realizes that children and the elderly are being executed, so she assumes the identity of an adult criminal in order to survive. She becomes a favorite of the SS officers due to her youth, and they eventually make her a kapó, prisoners who are quasi-officers above the other prisoners, who basically work for the Nazis and against their own brothers in order to get more food and other benefits.

This is not a pleasant tale, but a heroic and realistic one. Those who enjoyed Schindler's List and Stalag-17 should also like Kapó, it's that good, and belongs on the short list of excellent holocaust and prison films, and films with strong women.

Read more...

Era Notte a Roma

Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1960, bw (8.0*)aka Escape By Night
An important wartime film from Italian director Rossellini, who is perhaps not in the same league as Fellini and De Sica, but still a worthy entry into both WW2 and Italian realism genres. Rossellini is better known for his affair with Ingrid Bergman and producing offspring Isabella with her, but he also belongs on that short list of important Italian directors to emerge after the war.

In this story, three Allied prisoners, one English, one American, one Russian (how appropriate!), all escape and flee into the Italian countryside. There they are protected by locals out of a sense of Christian charity, and are smuggled into Rome, where they are hidden in an attic by black marketeer Esperia, wonderfully and credibly played by the beautiful Giovanni Ralli, who won best actress at the San Francisco Film Festival, and who dominates this film. The soldiers promise to leave as soon as possible rather than endanger Esperia, who risks a Nazi firing squad, but get trapped as they are surrounded by Nazis and collaborators, while being helped by Allied partisans fighting as anti-fascists.

Beautifully shot in black and white, with many dark but clear night shots very expertly lit. This has the feel of the ominous paintings of Italian De Chirico. The film bears the innacurate and misleading western title of "Escape by Night", while the accurate translation is "It Was Night in Rome", a more fitting description of the film's action. Don't be fooled by the misleading marketing that implies romantic interest in Esperia by the Allies, that's just bogus PR as the film is thankfully not that trite or soapy.

Quote: "Before the war, everyone was a fascist; once the Allies invaded Italy, no one was a fascist"

Note: the Russian soldier is played by Sergei Bondarchuk, who went on to become a director, who helmed the incredible 7-hour version of War and Peace in the late 60's

Read more...

Big Deal on Madonna Street

Mario Monicelli, 1959, Italy, bw (8.5*)

This spoof of heist films is one of the funniest Italian films ever made. If you've seen the French heist classic Rififi, you'll understand Monicelli's aim here - if you haven't, you'll still be able to appreciate this gang of low-budget crime misfits attempting a major jewel robbery, from the discovery stage, through the planning, then the execution.

A terrific all-star cast is led by Vittorio Gassman as the plan's leader, as he was given the details in prison from another convict who thought Gassman had been denied parole. When out, he recruits a local gang of cons who are all out of jail, including Marcello Mastrianni and Claudia Cardinale. Let's just say that none of the criminals is the sharpest tack in the drawer, so when they are all together it becomes a comedy of errors. Much of the humor is visual, and I found myself laughing out loud several times, which is rare for me, as most comedy is based on terrible one-line jokes and people being drunk.

As Rififi was an early heist classic that "defined the mold", Big Deal is one of the first spoofs of the newly popular genre, so it too defined a style that was later often repeated, with films such as Topkapi and Mad Mad Mad Mad World - think Peter Sellers, Alec Guinness, and the Ealing Brothers (The Ladykillers). Pure entertainment, a must-see classic of this style, and an Oscar® nominee for foreign language film.

Read more...

Il Postino

Michael Radford, 1995, Italy-France (8.8*)
This engaging romantic comedy was one of the most popular to come out of Italy. In a small seaside town, a local postman is having romantic problems, with unrequited love. Then the Nobel-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (Philippe Noiret) moves into the highlands nearby; since the postman is a daily visitor, they eventually strike up a friendship, and the poet changes the postman’s life by advising him in matters of the heart.

This is a very unpretentious and engaging film that is enjoyable from start to finish – it doesn’t overreach and delivers perfectly by giving the viewer a breath of fresh air on an old theme. Plus it’s all just plain pleasant viewing, from the actors to the locations. Massimo Troisi is excellent in the title role, and died just twelve hours after shooting finished of heart disease.

Read more...

Rocco and His Brothers

Luchino Visconti, 1964, Italy, bw (8.2*)
This epic length Italian film seems to have had a major influence on a whole wave of American films, notably Coppola's Godfather films, and especially Scorsese's Raging Bull. It's a complex, three hour film with many stories, my favorite so far by master director Luchino Visconti.

The film is in five sections, one for Rocco and one for each of his four brothers, yet the story is woven throughout each without gaps. The entire family, along with a domineering mama (Katina Paxinou), a fretful widow, move from southern Italy to Milano in the north for one son's marriage, and apparantly that's worse than north vs. south in the U.S.; they face immediate prejudice and scorn from all the locals. After only finding work at first by shoveling snow, we follow two brothers into small-time boxing, Simone (Renato Salvatore) and Rocco (Alain Delon, in his best dramatic performance). These boxing scenes are very prescient of Raging Bull, the actors do their own boxing in a gritty, realistic, documentary style; Scorsese filmed it the same way, albeit more dynamically.

We see these characters change: some grow, some degenerate, but all feel real. This is the #3 film for 1964 in our top ranked survey, and #237 overall. For me personally, it's one of the classic representative films of Italian post-war cinema, and one gets the feeling that several U.S. directors have already paid homage to this within their own art.

Other Italian bw classics: Umberto D and The Bicycle Thief (De Sica), L'avventura / L'eclisse / La Notte (Antonioni's bw trilogy with wife Monica Vitti), The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pasolini). I've yet to see the Rossellini films, as most are not available on dvd. (they certainly didn't come to central Georgia when I was a kid either!) Woody Allen apparently paid his own tribute in his title: Hannah and Her Sisters, also a great film, a complex weaving of the stories of several families into a giant unified quilt of a family story.

Read more...

Umberto D

Vittorio de Sica, 1952, Italy, bw (9.6*)

For me, this is de Sica’s masterpiece, a poignant and touching tale of an elderly man with no family, and he dedicated the movie to his own father. The brilliance of this film is that the two main stars are both non-professional actors. De Sica chose professor Carlo Battisti to play a retired pensioner who can barely feed his dog. The defeated pathos flows from Battisti’s expressions and one can see the wars and depression etched in everything he does. This is perhaps the best performance ever by an amateur actor.

In Umberto’s rooming house is a young maid of simple beauty, who sparkles with life, kindness, and optimism; De Sica cast 15 year old student Maria Pia Casilio from an audience that showed up to watch his auditions. She is literally in the same boat as Umberto, trapped in the house, working for a cutthroat, unsympathetic landlady who rents Umberto’s room by the hour for liaisons if she thinks he’s not around, and who wants to evict him altogether for being a little behind in rent. She is perfectly natural in the part, and often acts with just her body language, such a silent scene in the kitchen where she prepares coffee. Her character extends Umberto the only real kindness he finds, other friends can’t wait to escape his conversation, while she is his only visitor once when he's sick.

The star of the film for me is Flike, Umberto’s little Jack Russell terrier and his only loyal friend in the world. Umberto’s own actions center around the dog, and the audience’s emotions as well. Rarely has an animal been used so effectively in a film, doing tricks when asked, skulking away when hurt; in general, stealing hearts and scenes both. I would give this a 10 but, like most early neorealism, it’s just a little too depressing witnessing an elderly person who has lost all hope – this is still easier to take than The Bicycle Thief, however. #53 on our Top Ranked 1000, higher than the critics only poll. Cesare Zavattini’s screenplay was nominated for an Oscar®.

[Note: some commenter at IMDB said 'he should just go get a job'! People's ignorance of history, wars, depressions, economics, poverty, and in this case the harsh reality of growing old never ceases to amaze me. There will always be poor, unemployed, the elderly, and hungry people; they are not out of work or poor because they want to be or haven't made an effort, but because of society's failure to provide for everyone. Umberto was a retired government worker who spent a lifetime in service and is now broke as a result, that is his story and the story of millions: he was never paid enough to live comfortably in retirement. This is why De Sica and others made films like this, so we can try to work together to become more humane. A government that can't take care of the elderly has failed, in my opinion. The neorealist movement in cinema was, as De Sica said, "about getting out of the stuido and filming real life in the streets".]

Read more...

Malena

Guiseppe Tournatore, 2000, Italy (8.2*)
From the director of the classic Cinema Paradiso (Oscar® winner for Foreign Film), if you enjoyed that film you should also like this one. Tournatore again returns to his childhood for inspiration. In this, a young teenage boy in a small Sicilian seacoast town named Renato, excellently portrayed by Guiseppe Sulfaro in his first role, begins the film by getting his first bicycle. To the other boys, this bicycle represents manhood (for Renato, it’s long pants!). On the same seminal day, he discovers the beautiful married woman (whose husband is at war in Africa for Italy), Malena, whom his friends watch walk to town daily (then the whole town watches her shop). Melena is beautifully played in her first film by former model Monica Bellucci, and luckily for us, we get to see just about all of her beauty, as Guiseppe realizes that he is now becoming a man, and begins to spy on Malena, even in her private moments. He later defends her against the town gossips, which is just about everyone, as all the women are jealous of her beauty and the attention she garners from all the men.

The truthful pain of this story is that the boy cannot make himself older (she’s twice his age) and be the man Melena might need, as her husband does not return, so we feel Guiseppe’s helpless torture. Tournatore said that “the greatest love is all is unrequited love”; it’s a theme that also dominated Cinema Paradiso; the first love is almost always unrequited in Tournatore’s films, and it shapes his characters lives. The film starts as a romantic comedy, then turns serious as the war affects all these residents of the town, perhaps the story’s biggest shortcoming, the shift in mood and tone. The towns of Siracusa and Noto looked stunningly like the Renaissance paintings of Caravaggio, apparently untouched by war or time for centuries, as we see in many beautiful shots (the cinematography received and Oscar® nomination). We also hear another beautiful Oscar®-nominated score by Ennio Morricone (who has scored six of Tournatore’s seven films). Another rewarding and nostalgic film by Tournatore, whose fans won’t be disappointed.

Read more...